1.6.1 Introduction to the fieldwork of IDC teams
This dissertation examines interdisciplinary research projects in a modern German context. From the year 2012 to 2016, I worked intensively with a number of scientists who collaborated with each other at a German University. I chose this university because it is a traditional and representative one. Like most highly rated German universities, it is a comprehensive university
with thirteen faculties, more than one hundred and seventy research centres and institutes and five Max-Plank-Institutes. In addition, it has a relatively long tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration that continues to be strongly supported by the university’s administration.
My fieldwork research time can be divided into two parts (see Table 1.1). The first part is the pilot study, which started autumn of 2012 and finished February of 2014. The second is the main part of the fieldwork, which lasted two years and finished end of 2016.
At the first stage, I observed an interdisciplinary collaborative group I will name ‘CSP’
(computer scientists, social psychologist and physicists). Group members came from five different disciplines: computer science, sociology, psychology, physics and medical science. They held several meetings and established their interpersonal relationships from 2010 to 2012. Then in order to overcome difficulties of knowledge integration, they began an interdisciplinary seminar in the autumn semester of 2012, which was when I initiated this fieldwork. After another half year of detailed discussions on concepts and theories of each discipline, and with new members entering and leaving the group, two additional, smaller project teams emerged.
Table1.1 An outline of the fieldwork data
I was able to take part in twenty-four of their twenty-seven IDC meetings in these two and half years. In addition to attending their meetings, I interviewed fifteen of the twenty-eight participants (senior researchers such as full-time university professors and post-doctoral researchers; junior researchers such as master and doctoral students). Some reasons for the inflexibility of many I requested to interview may have been due to the inherent difficulty of
‘study up’ (see 1.6.2). Another possibility could be my informants’ unwillingness of rearranging their full schedules, and/or of speaking English, as interviews could only be conducted in English.
Interviews were conducted at least twice with all but two participating informants (they had left the project by the end of 2012) to check whether there had been a change of understanding on the joint project. These interviews are substantiated by thirty seven records of interview, sixteen records from participant observations and twenty four cognitive maps (see Table 1.1). Finally, even though both senior and junior researchers were investigated, only the data garnered from
senior researchers were used in this dissertation. Analyses of the cognitive mechanics of knowledge interaction in Chapter Three are mainly based on this set of data.
At the second stage (2014–2016), I was involved in an extensive research network consisting of hundreds of physicists, biologists, chemists and statisticians of the same university. This network was linked by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; English: German Research Foundation), a German research funding organisation and one of the largest research funding bodies in Europe. Even though these scientists were not working in the same DFG unit, they were keen on initiating collaborations. I formed fieldwork informant contacts with five research groups and nineteen key informants. Two physicist groups were led separately by John and Bob; two statistician groups were led separately by Will and Ling; and one biologist group was led by Chris (all names are anonymised). Together they comprised four project teams, which I will refer to as the ‘BPS’ (biology, physics, and statistics) group. Three additional informants, Jack, Shylock and Jenny, who came from two other physics groups, provided information of great value at the beginning of this fieldwork. At each of the three stages, I conducted interviews with all members of the IDC team, including professors or PIs, post-docs, doctoral, master and bachelor students and HiWi (wissenschaftliche Hilfskräfte; Eng: research assistants). Taken together, both senior and junior researchers were investigated. More details about each interdisciplinary research collaborative group will be discussed in Chapters Four to Five. The reason for interviewing all group members will be introduced in section 1.6.2 and expanded upon in Chapter Four.
1.6.2 A fieldwork of ‘study up’
The fact that my fieldwork lasted over so many months, to a certain extent, reflected the difficult nature of ‘study-up’ research in general (Jasanoff, 2010). Like many other science and technology studies, most of my informants were full-time professors and PIs who enjoy high socio-cultural status and have extremely packed work schedules. At the beginning of the fieldwork, I encountered numerous setbacks. After sending out countless introductory emails to the heads of various selected research institutions, I received far more silence than a few quite rude replies.
One exception is a written refusal from a kind theologist, whose email started with the following sentences: ‘young colleague, I am sure there are other projects that meet your need. But I am quite busy…’ Indeed, the fact that I was a ‘young’ colleague-trained social scientist whose fieldwork was dependent upon other scientists being willing to donate their time prevented me from being able to have an equal dialogue with many senior researchers. Another factor that likely prevented senior scientists from being willing to be interviewed is that I was seeking interviews with scientists in a German University but was linguistically limited to conducting these interviews in English. This unbalanced power- and linguistic-relation remained throughout my fieldwork. It made me reflect on the results of my pilot study, which were primarily based on investigations of the project leaders: students had perhaps also made remarkable contributions to IDC building but their contributions went either unnoticed or unacknowledged by both the interviewed project leaders, or also by me. I include these somewhat anecdotal fieldwork experiences because they are likely indicative of the real-world barriers an IDC researcher can face. My inclination to omit data from informants in lower positions of the hierarchy can also be judged as anecdotal, but indeed implies a potential tacit tension between how the quality of data provided by researchers in charge of the project is perceived relative to how the data of those who are less experienced in working in a large, professional project are perceived. That is why in Chapter Four and Five, there is an
explicit examination of the cognitive maps of all group members. In addition, I also conducted fieldwork observations of two young researchers participating in an IDC, conversing with them while they worked in their laboratories for an entire day. Insights garnered from Leo the biologist and his fellow collaborator, Albert, from the department of statistics (not their real names), appear in section 1.1 and Chapter Four.
Apart from the apparent power dynamics present in academia, another difficulty lies in the fast pace and demanding nature of academic professions in general. In order to survive and thrive in a highly competitive research field, my informants needed to calculate how they could get the most from their limited time. Thus, to help an unknown young doctoral researcher who requested access to their daily research life and first-hand experience, data, and research ideas apparently seemed too time-consuming and risky. Even though most professors and PIs in my fieldwork were very kind and professional, I still conclude this calculative logic from their words and attitudes, as highlighted by the anecdotes above. Just like Jack had told me, ‘you have to play according to the rule of academic capitalism. But it is your decision to just follow the trend to create some rubbish for your career promotion or to do the real science.’ Thus, my fieldwork experience also reveals and speaks to some of the key arguments running throughout this dissertation on opening the black box of real-life cognitive interactions in IDC and the barriers potential cognitive exchanges face, especially how potential interactions can be affected by the ways in which modern scientific researchers manage their time, labour, and intellectual currency. Findings related to this topic will be shown in Chapters Three and Five.
The nature of their professional positions also appeared to make them more critical sometimes – even sceptical, bordering on suspicious – about the scientific research I conducted.
An extreme example I experienced during the fieldwork was when a geology professor waved a yellow covered research report in his hand and directly asked me, 'are you a spy from Chinese government? You know, if you sell this report to your government, you will earn a lot of money!' As well, in the beginning of the pilot study, a computer scientist told me when I arrived for our appointment that ‘I will not take part in your research because your project is meaningless to me’.
From these refusals, I gradually realised that big bosses were so busy that I should make my interviews as concise and packed as possible. So I usually limited the duration of my interviews to within one hour. To a certain extent, the relative junior position that I was perceived to be in during many of these informant–researcher relations allowed me to play the ‘innocent card’. As a
‘junior researcher’, I was allowed to ask basic, sometimes even naive questions about the basic knowledge of the discipline, which may not have been possible if I was seen as a senior, experienced researcher with superior status. Furthermore, I suspect my informants would rather accept an innocent sociologist than a ‘young colleague’ trained in the same discipline, as this meant I posed no competitive professional threat. My research network started to expand after I received the initial acceptance of a few good-hearted professors, who not only supported my research, but also introduced their colleagues and students to me. This snowball phenomenon proved to be a very slow yet effective method for obtaining access to members of the highly protective and vigorously challenging scientific communities.